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National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. (taken from http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano)

This writing project is a good way of encouraging young writers to attempt to write a novel.

On wednesday 23rd July I was one of a fortunate group of Librarians to be invited to the offices of Bloomsbury Publishers to meet Mary Hoffman (the author of the fantastic Stravaganza series as well as The Falconer’s Knot and many other fabulous books).

We all sat round a table and discussed the Stravaganza series with Mary – how the inspiration for the stories struck, her love for all things Italian and heard her read an extract from the latest book Stravaganza – City of Secrets. We were also fortuante to hear er read the prologue from her latest (as yet unpublished) book set during the time of the Albigensian Crusade – the title escapes me at present but I will add it as soon as I recall it. We were also shown the talismans from each book that she acquired during the writing and used as foci to keep her mind in the project. Mary was also barraged with questions about her books, plans for future titles in the series and Italy. I was interested to discover that her family was close to one of my favourite authors when I was growing up the late Douglas Hill author of Blade of the Poisoner – the first fantasy novel I can recall reading and the Galactic Warlord series starring the last Legionnaire Keill Randor.

I believe that this should be supported (the campaign against age banding that is). There has been quite a lot of movement in the blogosphere and in national press about this – both for and against. Some links follow below:

Manga Fans this is your chance to meet the artists from the new manga graphic novel Demon Prince: Children of Gaia.

Don’t miss this opportunity to see the artist from Dimensional Manga in action sketching on some pretty big peices of board!

You’ll also be able to pick up some pre-release volumes of the manga book 1-5 exclusively and limited edition A1 sized posters @ Orbital Manga on the day of the signing.

The first 10 customers to buy vol.1 and a poster will recieve signed copies and a FREE manga art illustration drawn in front of them!

Manga Art Competition!!

To be in with a chance of winning some cool prizes courtesy of Dimensional Manga all you have to do is draw some cool art and post / hand it in to Orbital Manga with your name, email and contact number on the back.

Deadline: 26th April by 2pm (bring your art with you on the day of the signing)

Here’s what you could win –

*GRAND PRIZE*If you’re supertalented – there’s a chance of a possible position within Dimensional Manga!!

On Wednesday the 19th March the AGM for the Youth Libraries Group: London was held at the Faber & Faber Offices in Queen Square. The AGM went smoothly and quickly; then with official business having been taken care of, this left the evening clear for the main draw of the evening – A talk with four of Faber’s Teen/YA authors.